Nellie Fanshawe at forty would be a saint. The prospect did not
please her: she hated saints. She would love the tiresome, solemn
Nathaniel: of what use was that to her now? He did not desire her;
he was in love with Alice, and Alice was in love with him. What would
be the sense--even if they all agreed--in the three of them making
themselves miserable for all their youth that they might be contented
in their old age? Let age fend for itself and leave youth to its own
instincts. Let elderly saints suffer--it was their _metier_--and
youth drink the cup of life. It was a pity Dick was the only "catch"
available, but he was young and handsome. Other girls had to put up
with sixty and the gout.

Another point, a very serious point, had been overlooked. All that
had arrived to them in that dim future of the past had happened to
them as the results of their making the marriages they had made. To
what fate other roads would lead their knowledge could not tell them.
Nellie Fanshawe had become at forty a lovely character. Might not the
hard life she had led with her husband--a life calling for continual
sacrifice, for daily self-control--have helped towards this end? As
the wife of a poor curate of high moral principles, would the same
result have been secured? The fever that had robbed her of her beauty
and turned her thoughts inward had been the result of sitting out on
the balcony of the Paris Opera House with an Italian Count on the
occasion of a fancy dress ball. As the wife of an East End clergyman
the chances are she would have escaped that fever and its purifying
effects. Was there not danger in the position: a supremely beautiful
young woman, worldly-minded, hungry for pleasure, condemned to a life
of poverty with a man she did not care for? The influence of Alice
upon Nathaniel Armitage, during those first years when his character
was forming, had been all for good. Could he be sure that, married to